Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics

by Christoph Cox

From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this “sonic flux.”

Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general.

Genres: Music, Philosophy, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

Published November 2, 2018

About the author

Christoph Cox, professor of philosophy, received his B.A. in Modern Culture & Media from Brown University and a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Professor Cox teaches and writes on contemporary European philosophy, cultural theory, and aesthetics.

Reviews

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superlative, gets your brain thinking about all manner of things about reality, often exploding both sides of binary opposites in philosophical theories about reality. And surprisingly accessible too considering it quotes Nietzsche, Delueze, Liebniz and Bergson.

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX-XA...

[Yi Kee · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing piece of literature that links 19th centuries Continental philosophies from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer to Deleuze and Guattari. Establishing a philosophical and theoretical concept in analyzing sound art scenes, in terms of practices, technological conditions, representations and the sonic culture. The book develops a materialist stance in sound, sonic materialism and sonic ontology, where to scrutinize sound art, we needs to first understand its origins. Overall an intriguing book, full of philosophies, connections and relations

[Cole Blouin · Rating 5 out of 5]

definitive.